the Jupiter Project

To Kill a Mockingbird – Stephen Frankfurt

I’m going to start off with something decidedly unflashy and flagrantly un-Mod, in fact almost the antithesis of the groovy graphic freak-outs I usually enjoy – but this is one of my favourites, as is the 1962 Robert Mulligan film itself. There’s something almost instantly identifiable about the black and white photography here, something distinctly 1960′s that is shared by other films like Seconds, The Manchurian Candidate, In Cold Blood, and The Miracle Worker. The rest of the film has that same great look that is strangely both warm and cold at the same time. It’s like they ran out of that particular film stock around 1969.

I love the way the child’s humming leads into Elmer Bernstein’s score, the whole thing rising, then falling again, as the camera moves over dazzling close-ups and low angles, over the tiny, intimate landscape of childhood, transporting the viewer back to perhaps recall their own childhood landscape – all in a matter of three short minutes. Simplicity. Economy. Beauty.